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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
My iPhone is everything with Derek Daniel, host of The Blind Odyssey Podcast
http://www.theblindodyssey.com/
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DEREK DANIEL: Hi, my name is Derek Daniel, and I’m the host of The Blind Odyssey Podcast, and this is your Assistance Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
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This is episode number 213, scheduled to be released on June 26. It’s a special episode because I’m out of the office at camp. Today you’re going to learn why Derek Daniel says his iPhone is everything, and I’ll be back next week with our regular format. Check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.
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WADE WINGLER: So I was recently having lunch at a Chinese restaurant on the south side of Indianapolis, and the Chinese food was quite good, and I was being introduced to a new friend of mine. Many of the people on the show are familiar with Belva Smith. She is somebody who has worked at Easter Seals Crossroads for many years, is our vision team lead, and is also one of the regulars on one of our other shows, ATFAQ, or Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Belva said, Wade, you have got to meet this guy; he’s got his own podcast, he’s an assistive technology user, and most of all he is a really cool guy. So you’ve just got to meet this guy. And plus, he likes Chinese food.
So not that long ago, the gentleman who is sitting in my studio right now across from the table was sitting in a Chinese restaurant. The fellow’s name is Derek Daniel, and he is the host of The Blind Odyssey podcast, and we’re going to talk about that a little bit today. But when we were having lunch, we were talking about iPhones, and as somebody who use Voiceover, he said my phone is everything. I said that’s the name of an episode. My iPhone is everything? Really? And so I wanted to bring him here today and have a conversation about why his iPhone is everything. First of all, enough of my nonsense. Derek, how are you?
DEREK DANIEL: I’m good, Wade. Thank you.
WADE WINGLER: Derek, I’m so glad that you’re here today. You got a chance to walk around and take a little tour. We were talking studio stuff and electronics and recording stuff. As a podcaster, I think you like our studio.
DEREK DANIEL: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
WADE WINGLER: as is somebody who uses assistive technology, I’m exsighted about what you’re going to talk about with iPhones. But before we jump into all that, tell everybody about you, your background, how you came to be an assistive technology user, and we’ll talk about your show too.
DEREK DANIEL: Awesome. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Background. Well, I was born a sighted person. I actually lost my sight when I was 18 to a genetic disease called Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. I had not heard of it either. I lost that in about six weeks. I went from 20/20 to about 20/2000 or so.
WADE WINGLER: Wow.
DEREK DANIEL: I had just graduated high school and was getting ready to go to college and, boom, there goes my sight. So I quickly had to become my own advocate in those moments because I grew up in a small town, and per capita, there just weren’t that many blind people. So over the years, I became my own advocate. I researched all these things. Well, I wanted to do this, how could I do it? Sort of figured it out. I have a background in musical theater and performance and so forth, and so that sort of came into play when I thought about what am I going to do and things like that. I thought about the podcast. I like to talk and hear myself talk so I thought that was a good combination. But, yeah, I’ve been blind almost 14 years now. I lost it in 2001, so about 14 years now. Like you said, with the studio and the tour, all these wonderful gadgets and toys makes me exsighted because it lets me know the world is accessible to me as well.
WADE WINGLER: We like to talk about gadgets and audio equipment and other kind of stuff. Before we jump into the iPhone stuff, let’s talk about your show a little bit. I have listened to several episodes, and I like your style. I like your content. Share that with my audience.
DEREK DANIEL: Sure. It’s called The Blind Odyssey. I recently started it because I needed an outlet of some sort, and I thought audio was a great outlet for me. Video is okay but it takes a lot of editing. Writing a blog is fine as well, but for me being a blind person, I thought audio is the perfect medium. So I decided to start a podcast. The podcast originally started with just sort of, I’m going to talk about life as a blind person, and soon it started to morph into surviving real life — and blindness is my thing, but other people have their thing and so forth. I do talk about different things, and it always has that blind twist on it. For example, my last episode I talk about going fishing and how that plays out as a blind person, and with rest and relaxation as well. But the show is just something where anybody can listen and find something in there, because it’s for any listener, not just a blind person. It’s for everybody, whether they are sighted or blind or have physical, mental, emotional, or whether they’re, as I like to say, “normal”, they can listen to the show and hopefully they’ll find some content that they enjoy.
WADE WINGLER: Whatever normal means, right?
DEREK DANIEL: Whatever that means.
WADE WINGLER: So take me a little bit into your last episode. I haven’t listened to that one yet. Tell me about fishing.
DEREK DANIEL: The episode is called Like A Fish Out Of Water. I went on vacation with my in-laws and my wife and kids, and we went to a place down in Missouri. You have to get up really early in the morning to go fishing. I’m not an outdoorsman, nor a morning person, so this was great.
WADE WINGLER: Perfect.
DEREK DANIEL: We got up at 5 AM and went fishing, and I put on waders and went down into the stream which I had never done before. I caught about four fish total. That was the most I’d ever caught in my life. I was pleased. I really talked about how, in those moments, that’s really not my comfort zone. That’s not my area. And I thought about how the fish feel coming out of the water, you know. They’re swimming, it’s their water, it’s their world, and you pull them out and all of a sudden they’re flopping out and don’t know what to do. So I had to stretch the metaphor a little bit because once we get them out of the water, we sort of gut them and eat them. But other than that —
DEREK DANIEL: But you’re here today so that didn’t happen.
DEREK DANIEL: It didn’t happen to me, that’s right. But the metaphor is that sometimes we have to stretch ourselves and go out of our water, out of our normalcy, and even if it’s not comfortable, because fishing certainly isn’t comfortable for me, and it was difficult just because I couldn’t see the bait or the fish or anything like that. But with my nine-year-old son standing next to be, he really enjoyed it and it’s to let him know, hey, you can do whatever you want, even if it’s a little uncomfortable. I’m not going to go fishing constantly or anything like that, but to step outside of the water we swim in, if you will, and to get ourselves out of the space. It stretches us and challenges us. It helped me enjoy a lot of other things along vacation that we got to do that I wouldn’t have gotten to do if I was like, nah, I’m not going fishing. I got to play with my kids and have a really good time. It was enjoyable.
WADE WINGLER: Good for you. That sounds exciting. I can’t wait to catch up with that episode. So give us some of the nuts and bolts of the show. When does it come out? Frequency? Other kinds of topics you might have?
DEREK DANIEL: First of all, you can find it at TheBlindOdyssey.com. The show comes out every Monday, at least that’s the goal at this point. I’ve missed one Monday because of vacation. But other than that, every Monday. The idea is just to have topics and content where we talk about real life things. So I’ll talk about my real life, whatever happens in that real-life, and then hopefully as I read other people and talk to other people in conversations, the content will be focused around things that actually happen with people. There are a lot of podcasts that talk about striving to live your best life now and reaching your dreams and all that sort of thing, and that’s great, but what I found is while you’re reaching for those dreams, you’re actually living the real life now. We want to talk about real content, real people, and hopefully I’ll have some interviews in the future with people and so forth. I’m supposed to interview – well, I did interview Belva. I don’t know what happened to the interview. Technology hit me hard. I’ll have her on the show soon. Different things like that. So like I said, it’s TheBlindOdyssey.com. You can check that out. All of the episodes are there. All the content is there if you want to check that out as well.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent.
First of all, I owe you a debt of gratitude because you help me find some really good lo mein on the south side of Indianapolis.
DEREK DANIEL: It is good.
WADE WINGLER: It was really good. We enjoyed a great meal not too long ago. But while we were there, we were talking about assistive technology because folks know that our main topic here. And you said my phone is everything to me during that conversation. I wanted to expand on that a little bit. Talk to me first about your first exposure to an iPhone and why an iPhone, and then I want to get into some nitty-gritty about what to do with the iPhone these days.
DEREK DANIEL: Well, when I first lost my sight back in 2001, cell phones were this weird oddity. I know it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it was over a decade ago. Cell phones were – it was a sighted person’s device. That was it. Whenever the iPhone came out, it really revolutionized cell phones in general. I know people nowadays, especially if they’re younger, this is all they’ve ever known. But when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, it really revolutionized things. So what I found was with the iPhone, when they started making onboard, out-of-the-box, assistive stuff, so Voiceover and zoom and things like that, it worked with the operating system because it was built into it. Other things you had to put software on or you had to put different things or download things. With the iPhone, it was all built-in, and it worked really well. So when I looked at an iPhone, when I first started looking into an iDevice, I think I got an iPod. It was the iPod Touch, the third-generation or something, because originally it didn’t have the Voiceover and zoom. It came out, I think the 3GS was the first iPhone that had it. So I originally got an iPod and started messing with it. It was like a whole new world was opened up. I know that probably sounds cheesy, like ♪A Whole New World♪
WADE WINGLER: Ariel.
DEREK DANIEL: Actually, I think that was Aladdin.
WADE WINGLER: Sorry, I messed up my whole Disney thing. My daughter will kill me.
DEREK DANIEL: If my kids are listening, they’ll know. But when I got it, it really opened things up because it made a lot more things accessible that you had to have 15 devices for otherwise. So I originally got the iPod and then I decided to start using the iPhone because I had a flip phone with something like code factory, some sort of thing on there. And it worked and it allowed me to text message and read my contact list and things like that. It told me who was calling. Because I think people forget that when somebody called in the phone, it was like I don’t know who this is, hope for the best here. Now I can say don’t answer this call please. But yeah, so I started using the iPhone, I think around — like I said, I got a 3GS. That was the first version that I had.
WADE WINGLER: So it’s something that’s in your pocket all the time, every day. How long did it take you to learn Voiceover, and how do you feel that experience was compared to other kinds of screen reader technology?
DEREK DANIEL: When I first lost my sight, I used JAWS on the desktop. When I first lost my sight, I had this huge desk of massive equipment and so forth. I didn’t have a roommate in college because there would’ve been no room for my roommate. Plus I had a guide dog so that was a whole another thing. When I started using JAWS and things like that, it was kind of confusing. And with a touchscreen, it seems very intuitive because it’s a swipe left or swipe right. It goes through the thing. And actually, when I started using it, it was what was in my head – not that I invented Voiceover. I don’t want to make that suggestion. But it was like, wow, all I have to do is touch and it’ll tell me and then I can double tap or something. So it was almost like something I had already begun to use even without using it because it made sense. It was like, oh, this makes sense. This is how you’re supposed to use it. So using the touchscreen and with Voiceover, obviously there’s a learning curve somewhat. But I thought the learning curve for the iPhone and the iPad and things like that was far less than other devices I had used. You could get around the screen much easier because it was built into the system.
WADE WINGLER: I hear that. The word intuitive comes up a lot when people talk about iOS and Voiceover and even the other built-in assistive technology into the iOS platform.
DEREK DANIEL: Absolutely. It makes it work out-of-the-box. My wife helped me get to the settings, which now I can probably get to just because I know kind of where it is on the screen. But once you get it turned on, it helps you and guides you. It works that way because it’s built into the system. That’s the thing about it. I use a desktop with Zoom Text and with other such things, and it’s not built into the system so a lot of programs don’t get along with it or they have their fights. It’s like why is this not working. Well, with a Mac and especially with the iPhone, it works with it because it’s part of the system. It’s part of the ecosystem of the iPhone, if you will.
WADE WINGLER: So for a bit of contrast — and people who listen to the show notes that I use a lot of Apple products — have you used Android with talkback and those kinds of things? Any feedback on that?
DEREK DANIEL: Yeah, I have used an Android. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of last year, I decided to switch to an Android just because they had a bigger screen and some of the features. I thought I’m going to give this – and originally, Android had no assistive technology built-in. Well, they seem to have come a long way, so I thought, you know what, I’m going to give this a try. I think I had a 4S at the time, and I traded in my 4S and got a Moto X, which had just come out, which, by the way, is a great phone. If anybody’s looking for a Moto X, you should get it. Free plug, no affiliate link here. I decided to use it. The phone itself was good, but the assistive technology wasn’t. Now, some people might be able to use it better than I, but I had it for six months so it’s not like I tried it for a week and gave up. I had it for a solid six months. I tried it. The stuff just was not as intuitive. It didn’t read things like I thought it should. It didn’t swipe correctly. The zoom I thought was better on the Android just because the way it works, the way the screen responded to it was better. But the talkback just doesn’t compare to Voiceover, like talkback is like Voiceover’s ugly cousin. It just doesn’t work as well. I see where they’re going with it. I see where they’re trying to get to. Basically they’re trying to get to Voiceover’s level. They have some other gestures that I think Voiceover could use. But as far as the whole thing as a package — what I did like about talkback, I will say, is you can get other voices. You can download or buy other voices, whereas with Voiceover, you’re stuck with the ones they have. They are great voices, don’t get me wrong, but you can get other voices that you might use for other things on your desktop. So that was nice. But for the six months I had it, it was a challenge more than anything else. I did like the bigger screen of an Android, but now with the iPhone 6 and so forth that have come out, it’s almost like, well, I don’t really need an Android because of the bigger screen anymore. I have used it, and if anybody is using it, more power to them. But for me, it’s iPhone all the way.
WADE WINGLER: So Android was usable, but your preference is iPhone?
DEREK DANIEL: Absolutely. It was usable, but not near the capabilities that I can do with an iPhone.
WADE WINGLER: There you go. So let’s drill down into that a little bit. What are your top apps or the top things that you use the iPhone for? Maybe that’s the stuff that’s in your dock or just the stuff that you access all the time. But what are your go-to tools?
DEREK DANIEL: First of all, I make the most out of the built-in apps as much as I can because Voiceover works with them the best because it’s designed for that system. So things like Calendar and Photos and Mail and Messages and all those apps that are built in already, I try to make the most out of those if I can. And then going outside into third-party things, I try to find apps – I think it’s difficult to find apps because you’re like, is Voiceover going to work with this? It would be nice if it said Voiceover-friendly on the description or something. And most of them do work. You’re not going to get a game that has a bunch of graphics necessarily, but most of them do work. Like I said, I try to make the most of the ones that are already on there. I use the Mail app. I don’t use the Gmail app. I do have Gmail myself, but I use the Mail app and it works great for me. Now that Messages has built-in audio recording, you can send audio messages — because I use HeyTell — now that the Messages has it built-in, it’s almost like, oh, okay. So I think slowly what Apple is trying to do and what they’re really good at is switching to their world. Oh, you don’t need any other apps because our apps do everything. I don’t use a ton of apps, honestly. And there’s other apps that I’m finding, for instance, that you can take a picture of the document and it’ll read it to you, things like that. I think there’s one called Voice that the set that just came out recently.
Basically any app that, whether it’s a to do list, or whether it’s a calendar, or it’s just something fun, there are apps I found that like card games that read it to you and things like that. I try to find apps that are going to assist me that aren’t a ton of work on the backend. It’s like, well, I’ve got to learn this for an hour. I don’t want to do that. I want an app that works right away, I know what it’s doing.
And the nice thing about the iPhone is all of the apps at least have some sort of assimilation of what an app looks like on an iPhone. So the tabs at the bottom, things like that. Most apps work like that. That was the hard part about Android. All of the apps look completely different and you didn’t know where the stuff was. At least on an iPhone they have a very similar sort of spec in the user interface. That’s what I really appreciated.
WADE WINGLER: Consistency is important, especially when you have new apps coming into your life or just trying to be productive with the stuff that you have. You don’t want it to be a moving target.
DEREK DANIEL: Absolutely. I think that was what was difficult about the Android. I think what was great and what was bad about the Android is the fact it was super customizable. You could have stuff everywhere and you could make this widget, this and that. The widgets didn’t work very well for me. But it was great for a sighted person because they can make their phone look like anything. It was great. But it was like, no, not for me.
WADE WINGLER: There you go. So you talked about wanting the VO-certified or VO-approved kind of label. Have you found AppleVis yet? Do you know about those guys?
DEREK DANIEL: I follow them on Twitter, so I’ve been looking at things like that and their reviews. That’s actually been helpful to me to say, okay, they’re looking at the different OS’s, and they look at the apps and things like that. I think that’s actually where I found the app where it’s crazy eights or solitaire, things like that. That’s actually been helpful. That’s what it is being your own advocate, you slowly come across these things. Oh, I wish I’d known about this five years ago. This would’ve been great.
WADE WINGLER: For folks in the audience who aren’t aware, AppleVis is a regular contributor to the show. They call in app segments and we’ve had them on as guests and number of times. They are at AppleVis.com. It’s a good place to go if you’re wanting to know how to use your iPhone with Voiceover or what apps work well and what apps don’t. They’re just a really good resource. Scott Davert is one of our buddies over there who calls into the show on a regular basis. We encourage you to check them out.
I’ve got a couple of questions. I can’t even figure out which one I want to go with next. What’s on your gripe list when it comes to the iPhone? You said your iPhone is your everything, so there must be something that you see as deficits. If you could wave your magic wand at the iPhone in its current state, what would you do?
DEREK DANIEL: I think people get that question because you are very much in the Apple camp or the non-Apple camp. There was a commercial out maybe last year where they were fighting at a wedding, and it was like who’s got the best phone. If you look at our phones — what I find amazing is this. I’ve got a phone that is completely touchscreen, and I can do all these amazing things, yet nobody is ever satisfied. It’s like why doesn’t it make a holographic picture of me that I sent to my best friends? It’s like, oh, my gosh, you can talk to people around the world on this little device, and you’re not satisfied? I always try to keep things in perspective. And there’s always those rumors about, it’s going to show a picture on the thing. It’s going to have a 3D keyboard. It’s like, yeah, they’ve been saying that for years. So I’m pretty satisfied.
As far as what I could do with the phone, may be what it could do better, it’s really hard to say. I don’t want to say it’s a perfect phone because it’s not. But for me, what I do with it and how I do it, it just seems to work. I think probably they’re going to come out with more RAM and faster things, because sometimes Voiceover is glitchy. Like sometimes I’ll touch the screen and I hear the sound effect but nothing’s talking, so I have to turn it off and turn it back on and things like that. So there’s some bugs to work out, but I think that’s with anything in technology. If I could magically make it better, I think, one, they improved the screen size so that was helpful. I think the pop tart —
WADE WINGLER: The 6 Plus?
DEREK DANIEL: Yeah. I think that was helpful in using it. But as far as the internal, the software stuff, I think I would like – and this has really nothing to do with assistive technology necessarily – but I would like a better battery, just because I think using Siri and using Voiceover and using all the stuff, I think, drains the battery faster. So I’d like a better battery. And speaking of Siri, I think Siri could do more within the ecosystem. I think they are always trying to improve that and make it a little better. So say how can Siri help here and there? I think Siri could help a little more in better ways. So I would like to see that. I’d like Siri to be a little bit more intuitive with things. I think Google Now is improving that a little bit better in some areas and not in others. So I think Siri could do a little bit better job here and there. I’m always careful to say things because I don’t want to be the person yelling in the stands at the basketball player who weighs 500 pounds and thinks they can do better than the basketball. Apple is doing a great job. I’m just here to say it’s great and here’s what I like, but whatever they’ve got coming out is probably pretty good.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve got a couple of more philosophical questions. Jack of all trades or best in class, as I look at apps, I look at them and put them into the one of those two categories. I like the Microsoft Outlook app on iOS. It’s email, calendar, files, and other kind of stuff. And then I look at other apps — like I use Fantastical for my calendar on iOS. Have you found that you prefer apps that are super really good at one particular task or do you prefer apps that do a little bit of everything?
DEREK DANIEL: I think for me I’d rather have an app that does one thing really well. For instance, like Mail, it’s just mail. It doesn’t really well. Or Calendar. And that’s just for me. I don’t mind going into multiple apps to do things. Some people are like I want an app that does 15 things so I don’t have to open 15 apps. But for me, what happened with the user interface, it gets very busy and very clunky and it’s like, I have to go into eight menus or four folders to find this thing. I want it all pretty much one or two clicks away. So I want an app that’s, hey, we do this and we do it awesome. That’s it. We don’t claim to do anything other than that.
WADE WINGLER: Before we go, we are starting to run out of time just a little bit. It’s amazing how quickly this goes. Tell us a little bit more about the show, where they can catch you and how they can go on this blind Odyssey with you.
DEREK DANIEL: They can find me at TheBlindOdyssey.com. All you have to do is go there and you’ll find all the episodes. The podcast, like I said, is about real life interactions. I’m a blind person. I prefer to call myself a real person who happens to be blind. So they can check that out. I’d love for them to go find it on iTunes and Stitcher. I do have an Android friend who says it does work, so that’s good.
WADE WINGLER: You have a friend that’s an Android?
DEREK DANIEL: I have a friend that’s an Android.
WADE WINGLER: C-3PO?
DEREK DANIEL: Yeah, C-3PO, and another friend who looks like R2-D2. They can find it on Stitcher, or go to the Podcast app on iTunes. They can subscribe there and follow me. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, all that good stuff.
WADE WINGLER: Derek Daniel is the host of The Blind Odyssey podcast and is somebody who said to me over lunch, my iPhone is everything. I’m glad we got a chance to kick that around a little bit today. Derek, thank you.
DEREK DANIEL: Thank you, Wade.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.